It finally happened last weekend.
Pacific-10 Conference officials took another look around the
money-driven alteration of college football’s landscape and decided
their tradition-crafted league was no longer fit to keep pace with
the superconferences of the Football Bowl Subdivision and their
shiny championship games.
So, the Pac-10 sold out finally. It asked several schools to
leave the Big 12 Conference and balloon the Pac-10’s membership to
as many as 16.
It finally happened last weekend.
Pacific-10 Conference officials took another look around the money-driven alteration of college football’s landscape and decided their tradition-crafted league was no longer fit to keep pace with the superconferences of the Football Bowl Subdivision and their shiny championship games.
So, the Pac-10 sold out finally. It asked several schools to leave the Big 12 Conference and balloon the Pac-10’s membership to as many as 16.
Where were you when it happened? I was neck deep in the NBA Finals, World Cup previews and premature pennant race excitement when the ball dropped. One of my college buddies I tailgated with at the last Rose Bowl game notified me.
I have always loved and respected the Pac-10 and its tacit mission statement of putting academics and tradition ahead of large TV contracts and unnecessary title games. Call me a West Coast homer, but the Pac-10 has always done it right.
Founded in 1959 as the Athletic Association of Western Universities, the league eventually grew to its current 10 members in 1978 with two natural rivals per region. Where would the Conference of Champions be without the Apple Cup (Washington-Washington State), Civil War (Oregon-Oregon State, Big Game (Cal-Stanford), Crosstown Showdown (UCLA-USC), Duel in the Desert (Arizona-Arizona State) and the Granddaddy of Them All?
While the other major conferences have expanded and re-expanded during the Bowl Championship Series Era (hopefully, it will be referred to as a phase one day), the Pac-10 stood pat. It did cave slightly to change in 2006 when it went to a nine-game conference schedule, angering some member coaches in the process, but that only proved it can produce a true league champion without a plus-one game.
Did you watch the Civil War this season?
Superconference backers scoff at the round-robin format. Why do their teams have to risk a crippling loss in a conference title game while the Pac-10 schools get an extra week off to prepare for the bowl season? Oh yeah, because they sold out.
Not that everything has been rosy for the Pac-10. The conference has not yielded an at-large bid to a BCS bowl in seven years. Southern California has claimed seven of the past eight Pac-10 titles, inspiring the nickname USC and the Other Nine, and the conference appears to have fallen on its own sword with the nine-game schedule; no Pac-10 team has finished the regular season undefeated since 2004 (USC).
So, Pac-10 commissioner Larry Scott felt the time was right last weekend to invite over six Big 12 schools to revamp the conference. The Pac-10 and its no-money traditional ways became the latest victim of the financially fueled BCS Era on Thursday, when Colorado officially became the conference’s 11th member. Nothing says Pacific-10 Conference football like UCLA playing at Boulder, Colo., in November, right?
Maybe it’s for the best. New rivalries will emerge. New contracts and title games played at professional venues will bring in big bucks. The Sooner Schooner could cross paths with Tommy Trojan yearly. The conference will have a new name, and that seems fitting.
It’s just not Pac-10 football.
